Hi, and Happy Friday!

At our Q1 IR Roundtable event, How ESG Drives Trust Among Investors and Patients Alike, our guest speakers dug into ESG with a biopharma lens, exploring how we can approach ESG in a way that strengthens credibility.

ESG is most effective when it helps stakeholders understand how a company manages risk and makes decisions, rather than being positioned as a separate corporate responsibility exercise.

If you weren’t able to join us live, T2B Pro and Student members can watch the replay here.

Here are our top 10 takeaways from the conversation:

1. Treat ESG reporting as a risk communication tool. For IR, the report's core purpose is answering the investor question "is this company well-managed?" across clinical exposure, regulatory risk, and governance quality.
2. Reframe governance as the foundation that makes E and S credible. Investors read governance quality as the lens through which they assess everything else; "if it's a well-governed company, typically the E and the S are well-run."
3. Anchor the report to a focused set of material issues. "You don't want to boil the ocean." Three to five ESG topics tied to your business strategy produce more credible disclosures than broad commitments that are hard to measure or deliver.
4. Use frameworks as tools. GRI, SASB, and TCFD each serve different purposes; select one or two that map to your stakeholder priorities.
5. Start the clock earlier than feels necessary. Clinical-stage companies already doing the work that larger organizations report on often go unrecognized for it; formalizing early establishes data baselines and cross-functional habits ahead of when they'll be expected
6. Publishing once sets an annual stakeholder expectation. The timing question is really about whether your organization is ready to sustain the cadence.
7. Cross-functional buy-in is both the hardest and highest-leverage part of the process. When leadership visibly prioritizes the effort, the team contributes with ownership rather than obligation, and that shows up in the quality of the report.
8. Build in transparency about where you are on the journey. Investors respond to honest disclosure of current efforts, and companies that don't report transparently face real reputational and regulatory exposure over time.
9. Treat publication as the starting line, and consider AI as a tool for sustaining the work. "It's not a one-and-done report" — embedding findings into ongoing comms is where the strategic value is realized. AI is increasingly being used to automate ESG data collection, validation, and monitoring.
10. Look beyond the obvious audiences when activating the report. Vendor onboarding, employee recruitment, and advocacy partnerships have emerged as high-value use cases that may not have necessarily been top of mind during development.

Thank you again to Dave Connolly (Rhythm Pharmaceuticals), Liz Higgins (formerly Astria Therapeutics), and Sri Ramaswami (Sri Spoke Communications, formerly Galapagos, GSK) and the rest of the T2B IR Roundtable for a thoughtful discussion on a topic that has become increasingly relevant to biopharma communicators, and one that will continue to evolve and shape how companies build trust with stakeholders.

Lynnea